Raising Urban Students’ Literacy Achievement by Engaging in Authentic, Challenging Work, is an article about the “performance gap” that low-income schools are facing across the United States and a way to increase performance.
Research data collected has indicated urban students experience significantly more difficulty in the area of reading and writing than students from higher income families. The causes of lower reading and writing skills in urban areas have been attributed to funding inequity, poverty, high teacher to student ratio, a “disconnect” between home and school, and lack of adequate teacher preparation, to name a few. The article highlighted one particular intervention that began in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) called “In2Books” (I2B). The significant increase of student performance in the DCPS was recognized and accomplished by the I2B reading initiative.
In2Books reading initiative is a program that was designed to increase motivation for students in grade 2-5 to read, think and write about the text in correspondence with a pen pal. The students are given five books over the course of a year to keep and read together with their class or reading groups. The same books are also given to volunteers from community businesses to read. The community volunteers were matched to a student and became pen pals with that student. The volunteers are given guidance on when and how to write to the students electronically about the book. They were taught how to comment on important story details, to make connections of text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world, and ask open-ended questions as part for their pen pal letters to students. Students anxiously await the arrival of their pen pal letter and then responded to their pen pal by writing about the same connections to self, text, and the world while replying to key items highlighted in their pen pal letter. The five books were divided into cycles which the teacher would integrate with small lessons and activities that covered one of the five genres of the books; fiction, social studies, biography, folktales, and science. These activities required the student to read and reread the book in order to read for purpose and complete the activity.
Results in student achievement on state testing indicated that students who were exposed to the In2Books program showed a significant increase in achievement. Students who were exposed to the I2B program with a teacher who has taught the program for 2 or more years showed an even greater increase in ability. Concluding that teachers had to learn the logistics of planning the cycles, the correspondence with the community pen pal volunteers, using the rubrics, and the culminating activities. Teacher feedback on the program was very positive, indicating it is worth then challenge and hard work.
The major “take-aways” I have from this article begin with the value that was placed on selecting high-quality, age-appropriate, appealing books from a variety of genres. In my experience with middle school students this is an extremely important value and a way to get students to “buy in” to the program. Secondly, is engaging the reading process with the writing process to have valuable meaning to the student. The idea of pen pals is a wonderful idea that opens the walls of a classroom to people in the community with similar or different opinions and views. The students sounded excited to receive their letters, which gave the student a purpose for writing about the text that was valuable to them. The description of the program has an honest feel that makes you want to try it in your own classroom but also prepares you to meet the challenges of planning and organizing the program. Finally, while the article did identify the important steps that the DCPS used in implementing the I2B program, it did caution it is not a one size fits all program. Meaning that implementing the program may require modifying as needed to fit the new setting. Given the success of the I2B program I would like to start by trying a similar pen pal idea on a much smaller scale. First, I plan to select a short story that will appeal to my middle school students and have them read the story with me as a class. Next, I will send them all an email reflecting my thoughts and questions. I will provide them with a hard copy as well and give them time to construct a response then send their response to me through email. I am looking forward to reading their letters and hope to see some excitement!
